Western Digital Enters SSD Market with $65 Million Acquisition

Western Digital recently announced a $65 million cash purchase of SiliconSystems, a supplier of solid-state drives for the embedded systems market.

"We are delighted to have the SiliconSystems team join WD," said John Coyne, president and CEO of WD. "The combination will be modestly accretive to revenue and margins as a result of SiliconSystems' existing position as a trusted supplier to the well-established $400 million market for embedded solid-state drives. SiliconSystems' intellectual property and technical expertise will significantly accelerate WD's solid-state drive development programs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets, providing greater choice for our customers to satisfy all their storage requirements."

Products from SiliconSystems include solid-state drives with SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB, and CF interfaces in 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, CF, and other form factors.

"WD's strong balance sheet, sales reach, and operations and logistics capabilities will allow us to greatly accelerate our penetration of our existing markets, while combining our engineering expertise with WD will enable us to develop new solid-state drives to broaden our overall product portfolio and address the emerging applications for solid-state storage in WD's existing customer base," said Michael Hajeck, a founder and CEO of SiliconSystems. "We are extremely excited to be joining WD and enabling an even stronger future for our talented team."

SiliconSystems will immediately become known as the WD Solid-State Storage business unit, and join their existing lineup consisting of Client Storage, Consumer Storage, and Enterprise Storage business units. For more information, check out the investor relations Q&A posted on WD's website.